“It was NOT one of his best. It lacks a cohesive structure. You know, you get the feeling that he’s not absolutely sure what it is he wants to say”

by zunguzungu

The thing about this scene from Annie Hall is that the Woody Allen character is not actually as irritated with the academic blowhard in line behind him as it seems, not really: his frustration is actually with Annie, with their relationship, and with himself. This is Woody Allen Character at his most neurotic, plus-which, the two of them are at a particularly low ebb as a couple: though it’s Dianne Keaton’s character’s introductory scene, the scene’s function in the movie is to demonstrate the nadir of the relationship, so we can then go back and figure out how it got to this point. After a spectacular display of anal compulsiveness on his part, dragging her to The Sorrow and the Pity — which provokes her to say “I’m not in the mood to see a four and a half hour documentary on Nazis” — both demonstrates and exacerbates their dysfunction: she doesn’t want to see it because it makes her feel guilty and he wants her to see it for precisely this reason. Also, since this is a Woody Allen movie, their passive aggression throughout the scene is just a fight about sex, and about using sex as an excuse to fight. Her sexual problem, his sexual problem, her period, her bad mood, his demands, it’s all part of the war of position that both is a dying relationship, and the manner in which gendered resentment tends to produce resentment at the representation of gender itself, The Woman.

At this point, however, a narrative problem intrudes: though this is Annie’s first scene in the movie, and it’s important that the relationship be already doomed — still moving, still warm, but a terminal case — the movie can’t let the moment explode, not yet, nor can the fight reach its obvious (in retrospect) climax. We can’t see them break up, or even to really go at it; that moment has to be saved for late in the movie, or we‘ll lose the subjective experience of narrative build-up. At the same time, Woody Allen’s character can’t quite admit that things have reached the stage they’ve reached. He’s in denial — sex is part of the escape, the “sexual problem” that really means, in this context, all the things about her and their relationship and himself that he doesn’t like — and since the movie has to be as much the process of deconstructing that denial, of analyzing the thing it’s hiding, we can’t see it all out in the open just yet. The whole thing has to be present in this scene, in other words, yet remain below the surface. We have to see the gun, but it can’t go off quite yet

When the explosion comes, then, it doesn’t come at her, but gets re-directed at the ugly version of him-with-her onto which he displaces all his rage, the academic blowhard in line behind him, a Columbia professor of Media who is pushy, faux-authoritative, and pathetically pompous as he struts for his date in some of the exact ways that we will characterizes Woody Allen’s character for the rest of the movie. But it isn’t really about that guy. It’s about what that guy represents in Woody Allen’s psyche, and about the evasion that rage at him will allows the psyche to perform. It lets him forget that he’s the one who both patronizes Annie — he doesn’t think she’s smart enough to commit to, as she points out — and that he’s also attracted to her precisely because he can be smarter than her and patronize her. It is not a coincidence that he will push her to take a class in “Existential Motifs in Russian Literature” at Columbia and then accuse her of having an affair with her professor. In his mind, the link between pedagogical authority and sex is quite direct:

ANNIE

Then why are you always pushing me to take those college courses like I was dumb or something?

The dynamic is unsustainable: his ability to patronize is a huge part of what attracts him to her, and patronizing her drives her away, as he wants it to. Or not so secretly; he tells us in the first minute that “I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member” is the basic truth of his adult life with women, and it is.

In any case, the center still needs to hold for this one scene. And so, the impossible fantasy of “Well it just so happens I’ve got Marshall McLuhan right here” and the impossible fantasy that McLuhan will, unconditionally, support you against the ugly version of you is exactly the perfect wish-fulfillment, the wonderful “wouldn’t it be great if life was like this?” in just the way the movie needs at this point: experiencing a kind of psychic crisis of authority — the subconscious realization that his own lust for authority is actually poisoning his own lust-fulfillment — he creates the very embodiment of the kind of authority to which he aspires, who both takes his side, and in doing so, relieves him of the responsibility for that authority himself. After all, when Allen tells the blowhard that he’s wrong, he can’t help reveal that both of them are playing the same game, essentially are the same. But if it can come from a third party — from the man himself — then the narcissistic assertion disappears and the problem is resolved (and the scene can abruptly cut away, like a bank robber fleeing the scene of the crime). He gets to have it both ways. And in Allen’s original intention for the scene, you can see this even more clearly: he wanted to get Fellini, first, and failing that Ingmar Bergman. McLuhan was a distant third choice when those guys didn’t want to show (which Allen made quite clear in interviews), and while he does work in the scene, Allen’s great cinematic idols would have made the identification much more precise, naming both the ambition, and giving voice to the self-doubts that he feels and then raises to the level of artistic ambition, the making of meaning from his inability to cohere, to know what he wants to say. It would tie the scene together in a differently brilliant way, since they were trying to see a Bergman movie and saw The Sorrow and the Pity instead. It would have cut right to the amazing Alvie Singer mask that Woody Allen is wearing by reminding us who the writer, director, and actor in the scene really is, what he is telling us about what he wants and what he can’t admit to wanting, and how film lets him do that (and not). But it’s still a pretty good scene, no?

19 Comments to ““It was NOT one of his best. It lacks a cohesive structure. You know, you get the feeling that he’s not absolutely sure what it is he wants to say””

Good analysis! And it is a good scene. But I have a question. Relationships based at least partly on an exchange of sex for some kind of power (in the form of knowledge, money, prestige, etc.) seem to be common in everyday life; hypergamy is widespread, and a lot of people seem to be content with it. So why can’t Alvie Singer make it work?

“Why can’t Alvie Singer make it work” is pretty much the subtitle of the whole movie, right? The short answer is that “I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member”; he has so much insecurity (and self-loathing fueled by the contradiction of his anti-intellectualism at war with hi intellectual pretensions) that he cannot respect anyone who would respect him, yet still *needs* to be respected. In other words, it’s always far less about the relationship in real terms than about the ways his own “internal” psycho-drama projects “outward.”

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I don’t really like Woody Allen, hoewevr, the Monkey is right in that this is exactly what happened yesterday. Unfortunately, and to my great dismay, I couldn’t pull out Davey Johnson to tell the idiot to shut up and sit down.

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I didn’t know that McLuhan wasn’t Allen’s first choice! In many ways, I’m glad that it was McLuhan, as it fits well with the pretensions of Alvy Singer that his wish fulfillment would involve someone so esoteric that even “art snobs” might not be aware of his work.

It just makes the whole experience that much more random and disorienting.

It’s been said that Mcluhan didn’t really know what he was talking about either, that he was making it all up as he went along. So there’s a meta-irony there for people who are self-hating enough to appreciate the inescapable vortex of meaningless antagonism it entails.

Allen product as a whole is overrated. Here’s what happened, IOHE: the hippies are too stoned for existentialism, even of the lightweight sort, or…about anything, except like the fugly musick and lightshow of like 2001 (‘Nam pretty much forgotten by ’75 or so as well). So, Allen, clever New Yawk schtickmeiser comes along and offers a sort of 3rd rate intellectual flicks such as Annie Hall and Manhattan with some sexy bimbos. A few somewhat sober college schicksas pick up on it….like…JD Salinger at the movies or somethin’–as do the kritics. Who cares about like Nixon-Kissinger? The new Groucho has arrived. There ya got it. Bada bing.

So, I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but I probably will come off as one, because I have a real hard time moderating my tone. I’ve been convinced for some time now that psychoanalysis fails utterly when it’s faced with so-called affective disorders. While your reading is certainly interesting, and while Allen’s irritation does have something to do with his relation to Annie, I think you underestimate how much of his irritation really is about what the man is saying. What does the psychoanalyst do when a person, like Allen, takes almost everything literally? When, for that person, someone else’s iteration is simply wrong, and because of that, they have to show it is wrong. Of course sexual desire plays into it; Alvie is performing for Annie. But that wouldn’t mean he’d be any less frustrated if she weren’t there or if their relationship were not crumbling. The man is wrong – about everything – and that is what counts for Alvie. It doesn’t matter if they’re somewhat similar in personality – Alvie is not concerned with beating back his double, he is concerned that the other person is wrong, and on a subject that Alvie cares about.

I think you also misread – and Annie probably misreads as well – why he wants her to go to The Sorrow and the Pity with him. You/she think it’s about guilt – about making her feel guilty for what “her people” have done. For Alvie, though, it’s simply that everyone needs to know what happened, it is the most important part of twentieth-century history, and if he loves her and she loves him, she should be able to put aside her discomfort and watch The Sorrow and the Pity. I understand that you probably don’t see it that way, that you more or less read Annie’s motivations and Alvie’s motivations as at least operating on a similar, if not the same, plane, with Woody/Alvie just being “an asshole,” or something to that effect. But that’s really not the case. Alvie sees something unutterably important in The Sorrow and the Pity, but he needs her to just trust him on it and see the movie, and then she will see it too. He wants her to speak the same language he speaks – this is the crux of his dilemma. If only she could see through my eyes for a day, then all of this loathing, this misery, this tension would be wiped away. Of course, that’s not true, and Alvie knows it’s not true, but he hopes nevertheless. (We see none of this on the surface, because Alvie is all about sarcasm, one-liners, and humor).

I’ve been using deliberately nonacademic language here, the point being that you miss a great deal of Alvie if you assume that his motivations are necessarily hidden, if you translate his operations into another framework. You can’t psychoanalyze someone whose affect does not accord with others – you read him through your lens and end up completely misreading him. Alvie doesn’t feel the world like you feel the world – the classic wretch (Dostoevsky’s Man from Underground and Ivan Karamazov, Henry Miller, the narrator in Nausea, etc.). These characters are fascinating and compelling, but also off, very off, and most people can’t grasp the nature of their “off-ness.” Some psychoanalysis is possible because they’re not totally disconnected (a psychopath or a highly-autistic person, on the other hand, would yield nothing to analysis). But it only goes so far.

Alex,
Don’t worry about moderating your tone; if you’ve put some thought behind it — and you have — you can disagree with me in whatever tone you like!

The short, easy response is that the great dodge of psychoanalysis is overdetermination, and I’m going to employ it: in response to a “not that, but this,” I’ll say “yes, this *and* that.”

Another response would be: this movie is saturated with psychoanalytic references, overtly. Using that mode of approach may not exhaustively sufficient — I’m fully willing to acknowledge that it has limitations, as any critical lens will — but it’s organically appropriate, because its a conceptual language that Allen uses throughout the movie. In this sense, I simply disagree very fundamentally with your implication that I’m importing psychoanalysis into the movie; I think it’s both a language that the characters speak and a symbolic language that Allen, as filmmaker, employs to great effect.

This exchange, for example:

ANNIE: I missed my therapy. I overslept.
ALVY: How can you possibly oversleep?
ANNIE: The alarm clock.
ALVY: (Gasping) You know what a hostile gesture that is to me?

That’s an important exchange for lots of reasons, of course, but two of them are: the overt reference to the way they use therapy (and the associated language of psychoanalysis) to mediate their difficulties as a couple, and (for example) his assertion that when she overslept, it was *really* a hostile gesture towards him. In other words, this is why I’m having recourse to that mode of analysis; it’s the one the movie suggests as appropriate.

As for my reading of his motivation to take her to The Sorrow and the Pity, I originally quoted from but then removed this exchange, in the scene right after the movie, when he tries to get her to have sex and she doesn’t want to (and deflects him onto memories of Allison):

I actually like your reading of his motivation, and I think it’s also right; part of what he’s trying to do is bring her to good movies to improve her. But all I said about his motivation was what I take to be implied by this exchange, that he *wants* her to see the movie because the movie makes her feel guilty, which I read as being as much about a “hostile gesture” on his part as anything else. But your reference to “her people” I’m not sure how to respond to, in a larger sense; her status as non-Jew seems incredibly important in the movie, but I also never used that phrase, and I think you might be reading into that more than I explicitly said (one of the reasons I backed off of it is that that’s the part of Alvey’s character that I would feel least confident in analyzing, being a non-Jew (and born in Wisconsin, like Annie), myself). But

Oh, and finally, to your first point that the guy in line behind him is *wrong,* I would respond two way. One thing is that he actually makes very few claims that aren’t prefaced with “in my opinion” type qualifiers (“You know, you get the feeling that he’s not absolutely sure what it is he wants to say. ‘Course, I’ve always felt he was essentially a-a technical film maker”), and that this assertion of his opinion as fact (rather than the rightness or wrongness of it) is what irritates Alvey: he first says that he *feels* Fellini is indulgent, then says that he is, a direct translation of opinion into fact that you can only pull off if you have authority. And second, Marshall McLuhan’s answer — which is the very purest form of argument from authority — to the guy’s misuse of McLuhan’s theory only comes long after the Alvey is thoroughly irritated. In other words, Alvey is angry at a display of authority first, and only secondly does he get angry about factual error (the mis-characterization of TV as a hot medium when to Mcluhan it’s cold).

ZZ, you could even go a couple steps further with your reading in that last comment. The difference between hot and cold media has to do with which demand fixed attention (hot) and which invite the audience to complete the effect (cold), with the side-effect that hot media tend to exert authority while cold media produce meaning only by participation. The act of interrupting someone to say that they’ve mistaken hot for cold is a pretty overdetermined conjunction of form and content, although the blowhard’s speech has shifted toward the blue from the moment that it becomes available to Woody’s snarky annotations. Meanwhile, I’m surprised that no one has brought up the punchline to this whole routine; when the authoritative Mr. McLuhan steps out to straighten the record, he notoriously says, “You mean my whole fallacy is wrong.” As WJT Mitchell implies in his reading of this scene, authority rests in the medium of McLuhan’s strange presence and not in the somewhat garbled message he delivers, which punctures both his sage-like image and the fantasy of snob-revenge that has brought him into the film.

Further, any reference to Fellini in a middle-to-late Allen film can only be an inside joke, since Woody is emulating the indulgent Italian at this stage of his career. The grumbling about Fellini’s indulgence (the typical upscale complaint against him) doubles as a sleight against Woody’s methods and his character’s personality, which may be why he so flagrantly shows his hand as director and master-of-ceremonies to revenge this perceived wrong. That he deflates his own power is both in-character and what keeps the film from sliding farther than it does toward pitiable Revenge of the Nerds wish-fulfillment.

There are some salient points there, and I think I let quite a bit fall by the wayside in the formulation of my original argument. First of all, I should make it clear that my comment about sounding like a jerk was not put up because I feel hostile toward your argument or irritated, but because I sometimes come off that way when I’m simply disagreeing.

The problem or complication of the “yes this *and* that” approach is we have to determine the degree to which this and that are present. Since my argument is that the Alvy character, no matter how many analysts he sees, is resistant to analysis, I would say there is less of the “that” than we might want to at first think. Certainly, there’s textual justification for reading Woody Allen through the psychoanalytic lens – psychoanalysis is everywhere in his text. But, by way of analogy, while it would certainly help to know Catholic doctrine and practice in reading Dante, the best readings of Dante are not going to necessarily be by practicing Catholics (I would argue that the best readers of Dante are Antonio Gramsci, Samuel Beckett, and Peter Weiss, all atheists). In the case of Alvy Singer, psychoanalysis is a foil (we see it from the example you gave: “You know what a hostile gesture that is to me?” – it’s fodder for an argument, for control).

I would make a similar argument about the bedroom lines you quoted above, “The movie makes me feel guilty/Yes because it’s supposed to.” What’ going on here is not straightforward – Woody Allen isn’t trying to elicit Annie’s guilt. She’s the one who talks about her guilt; he only agrees. The point being, guilt here is not what Allen is after; rather, he wants her to deeply feel the film, he wants to “improve” her. If she had said, “The movie makes me feel uncomfortable,” he also would have said, “Yes, because it’s supposed to.” Or if she had said, “The movie makes me feel sad,” he would have said, “Yes, because it’s supposed to.”

I realize as I’m writing this that what I am saying is not that Woody Allen resists analysis, but that he resists the same analysis as Annie. “Alvie wants me to feel guilty” is coming completely from Annie. This is an analysis of her character. The emotion of guilt is her emotion. I don’t know what Alvy himself feels when watching the movie – perhaps the heaviness of it all – but I’m pretty sure it’s not guilt.

I think you’re right about the display of authority thing. I would add one caveat, which is that it’s not simply the display of authority. It’s the display of authority along with a stupid ignorance (a stupid ignorance that Alvy has probably exorcised from himself). I remember sitting next to two undergraduate students talking about film. And I remember that what was actually going on was that the girl was resisting contact with the boy, and the boy was trying to make contact with the girl. So the boy was just nodding along with what she said, no matter how inane or trivial it sounded, and she was explaining the difference between “movies” and “film,” which had to do with the latter being art – in short, it was watered down auteur theory. And what angered me so much was that 1) neither of them really cared about movies; what they cared about was the social interaction between them, but they would not admit that, and 2) she was expressing a view that I probably once shared and that I had beaten out of myself (figuratively not literally). So yes, there is a kind of “defeating your ignorant double” thing going on in the interaction.

I also find the Jew/non-Jew thing interesting, although perhaps not entirely relevant to what we’re talking about. I responded to the idea of “making you feel guilty” as a cultural/ethnic guilt because it’s how I was raised to think about it. My grandparents visited Auschwitz on a tour (in the 80s or 90s). Outside the gas chambers, the Polish tour guide said that he didn’t want to come inside, that he knew what had happened there. Their reaction: “Your people did this; you’re coming inside” (that’s a very sociopathic gesture, in itself; apparently, he thanked them afterwards, but that’s not the point). For me, until recently, the salient scene in Annie Hall was the split-screen at the dinner table, where Annie’s family was eating silently, passing the butter, etc., whereas the Jewish family was loud and boorish. Being an atheist ethnic Jew whose parents converted to Buddhism long before he was born, my most significant experience of “Jewishness” is around precisely this difference – decorum, composure, but most importantly, silence vs. loudness, directness, loud intellectual argument.

Regarding the resistance to analysis of those with affective disorders – a resistance, like I said, which can be one of degrees – an interesting question occurred to me while I was riding my bike to the movies last night (Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, no less). Basically, I was thinking about analysis, Zizek’s parable about Freud’s “unanalyzable” Slovenian patient, and Zizek’s discussions of Stalin. Anyway, while I was thinking about this, the following question occurred to me: Can we psychoanalyze Stalin (rural Georgian upbringing made him resent everyone else; petty, opportunistic bureaucrat; etc.) or can we only analyze others’ relations’ to Stalin? I’ve been reading a lot about psychopathy lately, and one of the consistent things about psychopaths is that, in the doctor/patient relationship, they often end up switching roles with their doctor and then breaking the confidence. A lot of doctors who treat psychopaths and sociopaths end up very damaged and very bitter, while the psychopaths remain more or less untouched (their concept of “learning” generally regards learning how to outsmart more people). (Lacan’s question: “Is there a fatal text?” The psychopath might be a fatal text, even when s/he is not out to kill you). (This is not just second-hand knowledge, either; I’ve gone through many ASPD online forums, and I’ve read reams and reams of discussions between people with sociopathic tendencies, and one amazingly consistent trait is the games they like to play with one another and the little dissemblances they like to enact; it’s almost like “Training for the real world” that goes on in these forums – how do you manipulate people in positions of authority).

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